............................................................................................................................... 1 Executive Summary ............................................................................................................. 2 1.0 Introduction ................................................................................................................ 6 1.1 O...

About 130 studies were analyzed to compare farm-level energy use and global warming potential (GWP) of organic and conventional production sectors. Cross cutting issues such as tillage, compost, soil carbon sequestration and energy offsets were also reviewed. Finally, we contrasted E and GWP data from the wider food system. We concluded that the evidence strongly favours organic farming with re...

Distance Metric Learning (Dml) aims to find a distance metric, revealing feature relationship and satisfying restrictions between instances, for distance based classifiers, e.g., kNN. Most Dml methods take all features into consideration while leaving the feature importance identification untouched. Feature selection methods, on the other hand, only focus on feature weights and are seldom direc...

Planning of modifications of existing wind farms by adding or replacing turbines makes new demands on wind farm modelling. Emphasis shifts from the calculation of the mean efficiency of the farm to that of individual turbines. Additionally, modelling has to deal with different turbine types and hub heights combined in one farm. Full scale measurements at two wind farms in Northern Germany provi...

Offshore wind farms with high installed capacities and located further from the shore are starting to be built by northern European countries. Furthermore, it is expected that by 2020, several dozens of large offshore wind farms will be built in the Baltic, Irish and North seas. These wind farms will be constituted of a considerable number of turbines packed together. Due to shadowing effects b...

The US dairy sector is facing structural changes including a geographical shift in dairy production and a tendency toward the implementation of more intensive production systems. These changes might significantly affect farm efficiency, profitability, and the long-term economic sustainability of the dairy sector, especially in more traditional dairy production areas. Consequently, the goal of t...

this study investigated the effects of land size and two leased and private farming systems of machinery on economic efficiency and factors such as total production cost per hectare (ratio of total cost of agricultural inputs and operations to farm size), total income (ratio of product and byproduct value to farm size), yield (ratio of crop production to farm size) and degree of mechanization f...

The technical efficiency involved in cocoa production in Cross River State was estimated using the stochastic frontier production function analysis. The effects of some selected socio- economic characteristics of the farmers on the efficiency indices were also estimated. The study relied upon primary data generated from interviewing cocoa farmers using a set of structured questionnaire. A multi...

To measure an unbiased farm-specific efficiency of individual dairy farmers, a shadow-price profit frontier adjusted for market distortion was applied to a sample of 860 Iranian small intensive dairy farms surveyed in 2005-2006. This measure was then compared with that of unadjusted measure that assumes undistorted market. A multiple general linear model (GLM) technique was applied to the data ...

Declining yields of maize as a result of Striga infestation has necessitated a new technology known as Imazapyr-resistant maize (IRM) to contain the problem. As a result, research and development initiatives with substantial participation of the private sector to transfer this new technology to farmers have been made in western Kenya. This study therefore assesses the adoption of IRM variety an...